This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them.Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

Google Compute Engine Leverages Third Party Support

The search for associations with cancer is extremely complex. On the institute's own 1,000-node cluster, it was able to find one association for every 10 minutes of processing. When the problem was shifted onto a 10,000-core Compute Engine cluster (1,250 servers, eight cores per server), the institute was able to discover one every few seconds. "This port required little effort because Google Compute Engine offers an environment that is similar to the institute's own cluster," said an institute report titled "Behind the Compute Engine Demo at Google I/O."

Holzle showed a visualization of the research in his June 28 Google I/O keynote. The human genome was represented as a circle, with patient attributes located in sub-circles inside. Whenever a connection was discovered between an attribute and a gene, or one gene with another, a line was drawn between the two. As the rate of data accumulations was illustrated with the 10,000-node cluster, one line followed another every few seconds.

Holzle said that problems such as this could be run on much larger clusters because they do not require intensive I/O. He then illustrated the pace of discovered associations when the problem was run on a 600,000-node cluster that spanned several Google data centers, possibly the three that now make up Compute Engine. The data visualization showed lines being drawn across the circle at such a rate that it was being quickly filled in.

Such a use of cloud compute power to solve big data problems may help find a cure for cancer, Holzle told the 6,000 developers in attendance, as they applauded the demonstration. "You benefit from our decade of experience in building and running" data centers in the cloud, he said.

The third independent software vendor with support for Compute Engine on the day of its announcement was Puppet Labs, supplier of Puppet open source code and the Puppet Enterprise product based on it. Puppet is a configuration and deployment engine that builds a neutral stack of an operating system, an application, and the application's dependencies, then formats them for a particular cloud target. It has 300 configuration models with which users may configure cloud workloads, said Teyo Tyree, co-founder of Puppet, in a June 28 blog post.

It can support on-premises clouds based on VMware virtualization. It can also support deployments to Amazon's EC2 and Google Compute Engine. With Puppet Labs, as with RightScale, users of VMware virtualization on premises can get automated assistance in configuring workloads for the Google infrastructure.

Google benefits by having experienced third parties ready to announce their support for Compute Engine on the day it was announced. Their support tends to broaden the customers who can consider using it, and it presents simplified means of getting workloads to the Google cloud. It would have taken Google months or even more than a year to bring the tools and polished interfaces to do the job on its own.

At the same time, these three third parties--and no doubt others in an emerging Google ecosystem--were eager to appear by Google's side, even it was late in getting to the IaaS party. "Google has invaluable experience and insight about what it takes to operate infrastructure services," said Puppet Labs in its announcement of Compute Engine support. Google may benefit from Puppet's value add, but Puppet and other third parties are clearly happy to be standing at Google's side.

Expertise, automation, and silo busting are all required, say early adopters of private clouds. Also in the new, all-digital Private Clouds: Vision Vs. Reality issue of InformationWeek: How to choose between OpenStack and CloudStack for your private cloud. (Free with registration.)

We welcome your comments on this topic on our social media channels, or [contact us directly] with questions about the site.

Cloud has drastically changed how IT organizations consume and deploy services in the digital age. This research report will delve into public, private and hybrid cloud adoption trends, with a special focus on infrastructure as a service and its role in the enterprise. Find out the challenges organizations are experiencing, and the technologies and strategies they are using to manage and mitigate those challenges today.

This IT Trend Report will help you gain insight into how quickly and dramatically data science is influencing how enterprises are managed and where they will derive business success. Read the report today!